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Comment by spoonjim | Hacker News Reader

Essentially, what we have right now in the sexual marketplace echoes what we have in the economy... a lot of the sex is being had by a small fraction of the people. The need for sex is perhaps as high as the need for money but nobody talks about this crushing inequality, perhaps because there is no practical way to “tax and redistribute” sex. The problem is worse for men since a man needs a certain set of skills and traits to get casual sex, but is probably equally bad for the genders in terms of finding long term relationships.

When social norms dictated that you must be married to have sex, every woman and man paired off and got to have sex, however low quality and in however unhappy of a marriage. I’m not sure this world is an improvement.

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> there is no practical way to “tax and redistribute” sex.

But there is a way to improve supply: give dignity to prostitution.

That doesn't work out as well as it sounds. Unsuprisingly, the amount of women willing to have sex with strangers for money is relatively low. Studies have shown that legalizing prostitution increases the rate of human trafficking to meet the greater demand.

https://orgs.law.harvard.edu/lids/2014/06/12/does-legalized-...

That's a function of massive income inequality across countries, though. Fix that, and the incentive for trafficking disappears.

Let's start with the assumption that we will have to solve this problem while under the constraints of actual reality.

Are you saying that massive economic inequality is a-OK...?

These are all big problems we ain't gonna fix in 5 years or 10.

It's clear that they were pointing out exactly what you're getting at in your second sentence: any solution that that depends on solving global income inequality is practically impossible over any reasonable timeline, and therefore not worth much discussion.

But fixing income inequality would presumably reduce the number of women willing to sell sex, so you're back to square 1.

That also depends on other factors. When being a prostitute means being a criminal, obviously it's not desirable.

Fixing income inequality creates more opportunities to perform activities, which leads to more socialization leading to more potential romantic encounters. Hard to think about a spouse when you're making $8/hr but spending 33% of your life behind a counter.

I also wager a portion of the people who feel they "need but can't get sex" may also learn that what they desired wasn't what they actually cared that much about.

In this regard, I guess one can argue that prostitution is a crutch to a much larger problem that may never truly be solved.

Do you think lower income people have less sex?

In the grand scheme of the world definition of lower income, no. I haven't looked too deeply into it, but apparently 3rd world countries have as much or more sex, but have less access to birth control.

In the context of "first world lower income", I'd wager there's a loose correlation. i.e the incel movement is one mostly formed from a frustrated lower-middle/middle class (which in the world context, means many americans for the sake of discussion). Another comment in this post heard something similar as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27041400

I'd be interested in any studies that disprove this notion. I'll admit most of this comment is conjecture.

I don't think it's income inequality. It's legality-of-prostitution inequality. That is, the traffickers decided to move their operations from countries where prostitution was illegal to countries where it's legal, because, all else being equal, it's easier to operate in the latter. The link doesn't claim that the total amount of trafficking increased, and the quoted results don't favor the "net increase" hypothesis over the "movement" hypothesis.

>> But there is a way to improve supply: give dignity to prostitution.

Better yet, guys need to learn to be the kind of man women want to fvck. They're not obligated and attraction is non-negotiable. Reality can be harsh. Guys need to treat themselves with dignity and put themselves together.

I think this is a good thought. My own religion gave me some direction for how to become to type of man women want, but it did leave something to be desired. And then upon searching for this sort of direction later in life while trying to improve my own relationships I stumbled upon the "red pill" communities. There's a lot of nuance to these communities as well. They tell men that you can become the type of man that women want, and they give you a roadmap to do so (work on your personality, lift weights, take care of yourself, take care of your life) but unfortunately these communities also come with some ideas that range from strange to downright misogynistic.

I think there's room for some down to earth, responsible men to try and fill this space. Right now the "teach young men how to be" space is mostly filled with misogyny and terrible pick up artists.

    I think there's room for some down to earth, 
    responsible men to try and fill this space. 
    Right now the "teach young men how to be" 
    space is mostly filled with misogyny and 
    terrible pick up artists.

Goodness yes. The PUA and red pill communities have absolutely poisoned this space and, at least in America, it's impossible to see how a healthy alternative could even take root. I know that if one sprang up, my first reaction would be to lump it in with the toxic crap and never give it a second look.

It's a shame because there is absolutely a need for this.

goes back to the author's statements:

>there’s a vast difference between a person who believes the stated beliefs of a group as opposed to a person who holds membership in a group as a defining part of their identity. Imagining a conversation with someone who generically believes women should be treated well is a much different experience than imagining the same conversation with person who boldly declares themselves a feminist; the same is true for what you’d expect from a talk with an MRA.

Always seems to come down to good intentions, bad actors that make such "identities" dangerous. Even if it's an otherwise honest person that just wants some self-help advice.

Also seems to come down to identifying oneself with / as... Well, anything. Maybe hanging one's whole identity on something is a sign that one is obsessing too much about that one thing; "Nobody is just one thing".

(Hmm, I think I just got more of a handle on what it is that makes me uncomfortable with "identity politics".)

>> The PUA and red pill communities have absolutely poisoned this space

I think the PUA has poisoned the space. TRP concepts I find quite good taken as a whole, but a lot of guys are focused on the wrong things for the wrong reasons. At its core, TRP says to put yourself together and everything else will follow, but the everything else is NOT suppose to be your goal. Some of the ideas there like AWALT are toxic when taken literally (as many do) but the point is that as human animals everyone has the potential to be or do certain things. Same for many of the other tenets of it. As one guy said, TRP is a map but not the territory.

But I agree a lot of folks miss the big picture of TRP and get lost. Much like reading NMMNG sometimes produces narcissistic a-holes instead of better people.

    TRP concepts I find quite good taken as a whole

    [...]

    At its core, TRP says to put yourself together and 
    everything else will follow, but the everything else 
    is NOT suppose to be your goal. 

    Some of the ideas there like AWALT are toxic when 
    taken literally

Is https://www.reddit.com/r/TheRedPill/ ("The official subreddit of TRP.RED") representative of the TRP community?

I'm not asking that facetiously. Sometimes an online forum, official or no, is not an accurate representation of a community as a whole.

Anyway, if it is an accurate representation, I would not describe TRP concepts as "good taken as a whole." The vast majority of top-voted posts are super explicitly sexist: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheRedPill/top/

    Some of the ideas there like AWALT [All Women Are Like That]

Based on what I am seeing, the sexist stuff is not just like, a regrettable undercurrent in an otherwise-helpful self help forum. I mean, it's kind of infused into everything there.

I would most certainly agree with the "get your shit together" elements of TRP, at least. And while I wouldn't be bold enough to call stoicism the one true way, there's a strong stoic aspect to TRP thought and that's generally how I roll. However, that's not some kind of unique TRP concept and there's no real reason to turn to TRP for it unless you really require your stoicism to have a heavy dose of toxic sexism.

The problem is that teaching men to become the kind of men that women want to fuck generates pretty toxic men if there isn’t anything beyond the “fuck.“ I really do believe the old model, where you taught men to be the kind of men that women want to marry, is fundamentally different even though sex and marriage are closely related. A 18-21 year old woman looking for a man to spend the rest of her life with is going to look at a broader set of criteria, and thus incentivize a broader set of achievements by men, than a woman looking to just spend the next hour with a guy. Being the kind of guy who women want to marry, so that you have the broadest choice of women to marry, requires some effort towards the criteria for sexual desirability: muscles, grooming, etc., but also things like having a good reputation in the community, having a good job, being perceived as one who would be a good father, etc.

It is arguably less effort to be financially successful and pay for the encounters you're interested in than change your self to meet someone else's ideal, which may or may not lead to said encounters.

Did you even read the article? We are discussing this topic from a sympathetic standpoint. Sure, the idea of "destigmatize prostitution" is an over simplified magic bullet, but so is your response. And their point would probably do more towards alleviating the problem than yours honestly. You're basically saying "want to solve the problem? That's easy: solve the problem."

Different people want different things. Prostitutes want money. Maybe "being the kind of man women want to fuck" includes being the kind of man prostitutes want to fuck, that is, being willing to give them money for sex.

The problem we are discussing is that some people aren't desirable for some reason they don't know how to do something about. Reality is harsh, that's why in order to get to the bottom of it you need more nuance. A lot of men out there want you to draw them a picture with crayons that depicts what "put themselves together" means. If they knew what it meant they'd do it in a heartbeat. Now the one thing they don't understand, that's not necessarily a solution to their problems but would still help them understand, is that there's not a one size fits all crayon drawing of that it means. Absolute statements like yours and the one you're replying to don't help much if at all.

Did you even read my comment? I ended with "Guys need to treat themselves with dignity and put themselves together."

I don't think that includes paying for sex.

Also to your comment "Different people want different things. Prostitutes want money." That's not what prostitutes want, it's what they need from a practical point of view. When you're just trying to get by, you do things you don't want to do in order to get what you need. Now the higher end ones that make big money probably don't need it, but I don't claim to know what their motivations are.

"The problem we are discussing is that some people aren't desirable for some reason they don't know how to do something about."

That we can agree on. My point with the crude comment is to alert them to that fact. Most people don't want to change and will reject the idea that they need to. You gotta smack em with the idea pretty hard sometimes.

> Did you even read my comment? I ended with "Guys need to treat themselves with dignity and put themselves together."

> I don't think that includes paying for sex.

A) That's what you think. Who died and made you God if defining "dignity"?

B) You think that, in large part, because of the stigma associated with prostitution; attitudes like yours are what that stigma is.

C) That's why the original suggestion was to remove the stigma around prostitution. (If that could be done, then you possibly wouldn't be thinking the way you are now.)

Physical sex is not intimacy.

Sex work leads to some very strange dynamics, because often the Johns are desperate for intimacy, but they are paying for women that provide zero actual intimacy (because it is usually entirely faked.) I am sure there is some ideal world where prostitution could satisfy emotional needs, but in my admittedly very limited knowledge it doesn't.

Prostitution has been legal in my country since 2003, however it is still stigmatised for both men and women (at least for my demographic, and I haven't noticed any difference for other demographics.)

This.

I sometimes walk by the red light district.

One time I seriously considered having sex with a sex worker.

I talked to multiple of them to find a click and I was appalled by all my interaction.

I realized that I wanted intimacy leading into sex.

What they offered: strictly penetrative sex and nothing else.

As I got older, another issue arose: to what extent is intimacy actual intimacy when you are paying for it?

Intimacy implies someone caring about you and you caring about him/her. That suddenly means it has an ethical component of idealism attached to it.

For me anyways.

I've made the plunge and become a "John" a few times now, always in other countries where sex work is either legal or tolerated/quasi-legal.

I must say the experience varied a lot. About half were mechanical and just felt like they were trying to get my money. That feels pretty hollow.

But I've also had some really great experiences where I felt like we had a genuine connection. I grant that this is not "real" intimacy in the sense of "they care for you", but it did feel something like chemistry or attraction.

And finally I have not tried this but have read enough anecdotes suggesting that you can get intimacy while paying in good sugar daddy-sugar babe relationships. That won't be cheap though.

I've finished my 2nd viewing of Blade Runner:2049; the replicant K buys an AI(-ish) holographic program that presents itself as a beautiful, loving wife, her name is Joi. Think about that, robots buying robot love (I know it's a movie, work with me.) Comes the turning point, they have to run. Joi has been a constant companion to K all this time, if the bad guys get access to her "memories", they have access to everything K ever did, saw, everywhere he went. You have to destroy the console, she said. But that means if anything happens to the remote, you'd be destroyed, gone forever, he said. Break the antenna too, she said.

On first watch, I thought, awww, semi-sentient AI fumbling toward love. On second watch, I thought, there's nothing here that replicant K doesn't want. He wants to destroy the console. He wants to destroy the antenna. That it came from her voice doesn't change that, especially not when the advert for Joi - a Wallace product - is "Everything you want to see, everything you want to hear." There's no AI in love, there's only K, has been all along. Joi is an extremely well-adapted product.

There exists sex work which in places like Japan where the experience is flirting with girls or cuddling. I haven't tried the cuddling thing but I did go to a few girl bars where you pay an expensive cover fee to get in but the bartenders are all pretty girls who will flirt with you.

My assumption was that the experience would somehow be cheapened because I was paying for it, but that wasn't the case. I came to the conclusion that my limbic system doesn't really know the difference.

Maybe I got lucky. A similar experience could have felt pretty bad if the girl was clearly only trying to get tips, but in this case it worked out.

I can't speak for Japan, but in Thailand, Philippines etc. the intent of such girls is to find a long term partner and settle down.

The movie Her is prophetic. The way to improve supply is with sex robots.

This will not provide for the psychological need to be valued and wanted by another human being.

Solving half of the problem is still better than solving nothing.

> Essentially, what we have right now in the sexual marketplace echoes what we have in the economy... a lot of the sex is being had by a small fraction of the people.

(Emphasis mine)

Possibly. DNA analysis shows that for every 17 human females that reproduced, one male reproduced. Meaning that quite high rates of polygamy, rape, or other unbalancing factors were the norm in human history.

http://awakeningtimes.com/8000-years-ago-17-women-reproduced...

http://econintersect.com/pages/analysis/analysis.php?post=20... Figure 5

There was some mating skew no doubt. But that number is total nonsense and the study does not show that.

It makes sense for how tough life was 8000 years ago, I wonder what it was prior to ww1, and if that would be a useful comparison as well.

No it doesn't https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2015/03/21/y-chromosome-crash...

Respectfully, after reading the original paper, I agree with the findings of the authors. The last bit in the abstract puts their findings the best:

"In contrast to demographic reconstructions based on mtDNA, we infer a second strong bottleneck in Y-chromosome lineages dating to the last 10 ky. We hypothesize that this bottleneck is caused by cultural changes affecting variance of reproductive success among males."

Saying that the average man reproduces less than the average woman seems to fit the facts as presented in the paper. I've not read other papers that may refute that one though. This is not my area of expertise.

The extreme skew (1 male for every 17 females reproducing) is what's incorrect, not the average man having less reproductive success than the average woman.

Don't forget war. I imagine when two groups of humans whether it be two caveman tribes or two Napoleonic armies, massive numbers of young males were killed off.

I can understand why people think of these as "market problems," but I think this angle tends to loom larger than it actually is.

It's at its strongest in a 19 year old, "dorm room" context. These times mean a lot to people, but in practicality this is a short period of time at the end of adolescence. Overall in life, relationships are not generally like a market. There's no "50% of the girls shagged 50% of the guys" stuff to make it like one. Mostly people are in monogamous relationships. Discrepancies (in the article) are smaller and are from dating patterns between age brackets.

In any case, why analogize? Think of it as a culture. Dating culture. Marriage culture. Late 40s hookup culture. Whatever "failures" exist are cultural failures.

If it really was mostly a market situation, the market would clear.

>there is no practical way to “tax and redistribute” sex

This is part of the function of anti-bigamy laws and frowning upon promiscuity, is it not?

That's a cap (and supply restriction), not redistribution.

  “It's a fact...that in societies like ours sex truly represents a second system of differentiation, completely independent of money; and as a system of differentiation it functions just as mercilessly. The effects of these two systems are, furthermore, strictly equivalent. Just like unrestrained economic liberalism, and for similar reasons, sexual liberalism produces phenomena of absolute pauperization . Some men make love every day; others five or six times in their life, or never. Some make love with dozens of women; others with none. It's what's known as 'the law of the market'...Economic liberalism is an extension of the domain of the struggle, its extension to all ages and all classes of society. Sexual liberalism is likewise an extension of the domain of the struggle, its extension to all ages and all classes of society.”

― Michel Houellebecq, Extension du domaine de la lutte

Robin Hanson has also compares sex and income distribution:

https://www.overcomingbias.com/2018/06/comparing-income-sex-...

This is a really interesting perspective. Thank you for posting it. The author also neatly outlines why it's so hard to talk about controversial stuff nowadays.

> Most who expressed outrage at my post, even most in the mass media, did not offer counter-arguments to my analogy.

> They were instead content to identify me with sex-poor people today willing to do or sympathize with violence in order to advocate for sex redistribution.

> Such ‘incel’ advocates were said to be personally deeply icky, and therefore so also were any policies they advocate, and also anyone like me who did not attack they and their policies immediately with extreme prejudice.

Love seeing a better thinker and writer state my opinion so much better.

I would argue that recent switches to a "pick up style" of dating app (e.g. Tindr) exacerbates this problem.

For sure. Most heterosexual women would prefer sex every 10 days with a very sexually appealing man who is having sex with 9 other women than having sex every day with an average-looking exclusive Schlub. The latter was their life under the proscription of extramarital sex but Tinder allows them the former.

Is there a research study on this? I'm not sure I buy into the Don Juan hypothesis.

The numbers in the article itself state that more 18-29 year old women than men are having sex. Excluding gay sex this implies the “Don Juan hypothesis” as you call it.

Not necessarily -- it could just as well imply that 19-29 year old women are having entirely-monogamous sex with men outside (hopefully above) the 18-29 range.

Also, that 18-29 chart is about people looking for a relationship. The data about actually-having-sex [1] used different age ranges, breaking up 18-24 and 25-34. It shows a spike of no-sex in 18-24 men, which evens out with women once they're into the 25-35 range. The article didn't use the handy graph in figure 1 from the study which was quite informative: [2]

[1]: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...

[2]: https://cdn.jamanetwork.com/ama/content_public/journal/jaman...

This is accurate. When I was 18-24 life sucked, because all the younger women were still in high school, and almost all of the women my own age were hooking up with older guys. The sweet spot for men starts around the late 20s.

My hypothesis is that this is because of a pretty significant gap in EQ and maturity between young men and women. Also women’s prime reproductive years (physically) are from late teens to early 30s. Men’s prime years to be able to support their partners is usually starting around 30s. Makes sense when you think of it like that.

cannot be upvoted enough.

Your idea doesn't make sense since women report higher sexual partners than men in ALL age groups in the figure you linked,

No they don't. In every age group there's more men than women in the 2 and >3 partners categories, while women are visibly ahead in the 1 partner category.

Based purely on that figure, we can reasonably say that after age 18-24 men and women are about as likely to have had sex with at least one person in the last year (within the error bars of each other), with men being more likely to have had sex with more than one person in the last year.

Right, but if the 18-24 women are having sex with older men and the numbers in the older group are equal, there are more men who will be having sex with more than one woman than the inverse, or the numbers wouldn’t balance.

Not if you take into account people having sex with large age disparities.

> what we have right now in the sexual marketplace echoes what we have in the economy...

It’s an economy of sorts (age, looks, height), but it also follows the financial security aspect. Inequality creates a class of people that hoard desirable traits

> When social norms dictated that you must be married to have sex, every woman and man paired off and got to have sex, however low quality and in however unhappy of a marriage

Might we see a return to conservative values here?

The problem is this bizarre set of expectations that's sprung up with some folks. Sex isn't equal. It never has been. It never will be. Think about it for real for a minute.

You can say the same about wealth, or height, or anything, that doesn’t change the fact that the people who don’t have any want some.

Let this be the moment when the pendulum began to swing back in the conservative direction. Conservatives get a lot of things wrong but not all of it.

Free markets are best, except for sex. IOW, capitalist in the streets, communist in the sheets?

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